by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Ugh. Where to begin with this one. At the core of the hypermodern conservative movement is fear among your average Traditionalist that they, personally, will have their life ruined by the “woke cancel culture mob” simply for the crime of being conservative.
This is something at the forefront of the minds of people in my family. And I totally validate that fear. I suppose if all your content is MAGA and MAGA adjacent bullshit then the fear of being personally canceled because your political views don’t follow the “media narrative” makes a lot of sense.
Anyway, I struggle a lot with the idea of the “Great Awoking” because I know that a lot of my own views don’t fit the much maligned “media narrative.” I’m something of a kook and become even more so when I get drunk. As such, it’s very possible that I could very well be “canceled” at some point in the future simply because, say, I fucking hate the Bechdel Test.
But let’s get back to the point — what the fuck is the “Great Awoking” in the first place?
Well, this is very complex question because it’s all very abstract. At some point in Obama’s second term it became clear that conservatives had lost the culture wars and we had reached the high water mark of social change in the USA. And this is laid the groundwork for the where we are now, where I spend way too much of my time struggling to figure out if we’re going to explode into civil war or implode into autocracy.
Young people — especially those juicy, juicy wealthy teens that advertisers covet — took it for granted that progress was always going to be easy. They began to love it when their favorite celebrity came out as gay. The list goes on. This changed how things were framed in the media because a lot of advertisers began to want to stay “hip” to what the cool kids were thinking.
At the same time, something about Obama winning a second term turned the conservative movement into a rancid, hateful piece of vile hate — and MAGA was born.
And so, here we are.
On one side, you have the center-Left that has a lot of soft power and one the other you have the center-Right that has a huge amount of hard power that continues to grow. They are, in short, ascendant.
And so now we have to sit around and wait to see if we have a civil war or if we turn into an autocracy where the “Great Awoking” is snuffed out once and for all by MAGA’s hate.
I have no idea which one of those two options we’re going to pick. But I will have a far better sense of things once Roe is officially overturned. If there is any political violence because of it, then, guess what!
But back to the Great Awoking. This concept is something I see bandied about by well meaning conservatives who want to understand what fellow young people are thinking. They’re like the earnest assistant youth paster who sits backwards in his chair and says, “Do you know who else was woke?” But for all their well meaning earnestness, things are far more dire than they realize.
MAGA really hates the Great Awoking and they are willing to destroy America to ensure its demise. The only question at this point is if they get what they want peacefully or not.
